That doesn’t seem to support the grandiose conclusions that are usually made on the basis of the EMH. The same would be true of a poker game, for instance, or simply a bet between 3 people where only one of them can be right.
Yes, precisely. And that is a meaningful prediction.
The EMH is not a grandiose claim. It is a boring rebuttal to grandiosity. Saying “you probably will make an average amount of money for your intelligence and education level trading stocks as you would in any other profession” is decidedly dull. Saying “people with millions or billions of dollars invested in X keep a pretty tight bead on new information related to X and make trades based on it” is also a sensible claim. Saying “boy, this is complicated stuff—are you sure that’s alpha you’ve found there?” is reasonable.
In the end, money talks. So if anybody is dead convinced that the EMH is wrong, there are hundred dollar bills lying around in the stock market, and they’ve found a way to pick them up, the ultimate test is just to say “go make a lot of money, then, and let me know how it all went once you’ve exited the stock market!”
Yes, precisely. And that is a meaningful prediction.
The EMH is not a grandiose claim. It is a boring rebuttal to grandiosity. Saying “you probably will make an average amount of money for your intelligence and education level trading stocks as you would in any other profession” is decidedly dull. Saying “people with millions or billions of dollars invested in X keep a pretty tight bead on new information related to X and make trades based on it” is also a sensible claim. Saying “boy, this is complicated stuff—are you sure that’s alpha you’ve found there?” is reasonable.
In the end, money talks. So if anybody is dead convinced that the EMH is wrong, there are hundred dollar bills lying around in the stock market, and they’ve found a way to pick them up, the ultimate test is just to say “go make a lot of money, then, and let me know how it all went once you’ve exited the stock market!”